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GSAT Project Status Report
Period: Jan 2010 - Mar 2010
I. Major accomplishments
Revision of the GENI Security Architecture document to reflect the spiral 2 evolution of implementations of the four control frameworks, as well as initial descriptions or security architecture-level analysis of a wider range of projects including instrumentation & measurement, and GENI aggregates.
A. Milestones achieved
Intermediate version of the GENI Security Architecture Draft for Spiral 2. Coordination meeting with GMOC project at GEC-7 at Duke.
B. Deliverables made
Posting of the GENI Security Architecture Draft Spiral 2, Version 0.5. This corresponds to the first revision of the GENI Security Architecture report for Spiral 2 (originally slated for 1/31/2010, actually posted 3/15/2010.)
II. Description of work performed during last quarter
A. Activities and findings
Alefiya Hussain made detailed reviews of several control frameworks, including ORCA, ProtoGENI, PlanetLab and DETER TIED, updating the security architecture documentation to account for changes to the control frameworks during the early part of spiral 2. In addition, we also surveyed security issues for a broader set of GENI projects, and prepared write-ups based upon available information and email exchanges with GENI project PIs. Write-ups included: Embedded Real-Time Measurement Framework for GENI (and its integration strategy with ORCA); Instrumentation Tools (James Griffion’s project from Kentucky); and Enterprise GENI based on a detailed conversation with Rob Sherwood at Stanford. We also wrote up security issues related to GIMS (Paul Barford/Wisconsin); the Digital Object Registry (Giridar Manepali, CNRI) ; and LEFA (Ken Klingenstein, Internet2).
Overall, there are clearly common issues in the suite of GENI instrumentation and measurement efforts, but it is also somewhat early in the groups work toward standardizing functionality to set the security mechanisms in stone. The projects in this area are generally aware of security issues, and leaving hooks or placeholders within their designs that will be able to leverage their control framework’s security machinery at some point in the future.
We also organized a birds-of-a-feather meeting for security-interested individuals at the GEC-7 meeting at Duke. Attendance in the evening was quite good, with about a dozen individuals gathering for a long discussion on the outdoor patio. As more organizations participate with a security focus, or bring security expertise to a larger number of projects across GENI, this group may become more of a formal WG or develop its own meeting and collaboration schedule.
B. Project participants
The following SPARTA staff are participating in the GSAT project: Stephen Schwab, Alefiya Hussain. We may also consult with Sandy Murphy, although her participation is limited by available funding.
C. Publications (individual and organizational)
None.
D. Outreach activities
None.
E. Collaborations
We have been actively collaborating with Rob Ricci/Utah and other members of the projects collaborating under the ProtoGENI cluster umbrella. This collaboration includes periodic bi-weekly status telecons as well as additional frequent email and other interactions with Emulab staff at Utah.
We also have been working closely with John Wroclawski and Ted Faber of USC/ISI under the DETER project (DETER TIED). In particular, we have progressed to integrating Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) as a basis for prototyping the security abstractions underpinning the DETER Federation implementation.
There have also been discussions with Jeff Chase of Duke on making another set of revisions to the slice-based facility architecture document.
At GEC-7, Stephen Schwab had discussions with Ken Klingenstein about how to bring Shibboleth and ABAC techniques together, as well as how to shift the broader discussion of GENI security mechanisms towards greater use of Federated Identity, and a better understanding of how to take advantage of attribute-based mechanisms for use in making authorization decisions based on relying-party (control framework or aggregate manager) authorization policies.
Additional email discussions with Jon-Paul Herron and Luke Fowler of the GMOC project at Indiana University have also taken place, to discuss issues related to how GMOC might secure data received from control frameworks and aggregates. At this point, GMOC is still worked toward getting data, and none of what they are currently receiving or expected to receive is other than general testbed information that would be expected to be publicly searchable/browsable.